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Friday, December 27, 2013

This,
The Writing Report, is the first of what I hope will be a regular series of posts
in which I will report, on a fairly regular schedule, about my writing
activities. I'd like this to be a monthly report, but since this is the first in
a series and I have many months’ worth of things to cover, this first post will
be a summary for the entire year, 2013.

First,
I need to make note of the fact that I have not written many blog posts for
Complexity Simplified this year. This isn't due to having nothing to say (I
always have something to say) but, rather, to having a lot of other writing
activities taking up my time and energy. One of my blogging venues for a time
was the #amwriting
blog, which was a great place to share tips about craft and the writing
process with other writers. That blog has now been permanently archived, but
the posts are all still available, including one I wrote about my favorite books for
writers. In another, I shared a few simple yoga poses for writers
that can help writers manage the physical challenges that often impede our writing.

In
addition to this little bit of blogging, I have been writing - a lot. Over the
summer I participated in my own personal a Story-A-Week project in which I
either wrote a first draft of a new story or completed a revised draft of an
existing short story every week. My project ran from the second week of May to
the end of August and was inspired by the Story-A-Day
challenge. I attempted this challenge before realizing that the daily pace was
too fast for me and I needed to spend a bit more time with each story to feel
like I'd actually "written a story." So, instead of abandoning
the idea, I adapted it to my own needs and I’m thrilled with how it worked out.

Although
there were 17 weeks in my summer, I actually completed only 15 stories, since
two of those weeks were spent in Iowa working on another exciting writing
venture (more on that below!) Still, I am very pleased with the results of my
Story-A-Week project, as it resulted in 15 story drafts, 6 of which were brand
new pieces. I took several of these to my critique group for feedback and got
three of them into decent-enough shape that I sent them out to literary
magazines. One story was sent to two places. Of these four submissions, one piece,
my very first attempt at flash fiction, was accepted for publication (yes!) and
is due to appear in 2014 in Gargoyle Magazine.

The
Story-A-Week project went onto the back burner in July when I traveled to the
University of Iowa for a ten-day writing intensive at the Iowa Summer Writing
Festival. While there, I took three short courses: (1) Advanced Novel; (2)
Yoga and Writing; and (3) The Seven Basic Plots. The latter two were short
weekend seminars, but the first was a weeklong writers’ workshop led by a
fantastic instructor, Rebecca
Johns. Twelve of us, all aspiring novelists, submitted the first 30 pages
of our novels-in-progress along with a plot synopsis for the rest of the book
and we spent the week reading, critiquing and learning from Rebecca about plot
structure, characterization, the best way to enter a story, point of view, and
on and on.

One
result of the Iowa workshop was a realization that the novel I’d been
working on for a couple of years needed to be restructured. I recently finished
a revision based on what I learned in Iowa and have shipped it off to a writing
consultant to get additional feedback about whether it’s ready now to be sent
out.

Another result of the Iowa workshop was a clear understanding that what
I needed more than anything to improve my writing was more education and
instruction. The experience in Iowa was exciting, challenging and life changing
and I came home from it knowing I needed more like it. I spent the fall
researching graduate writing programs and finally decided to take the plunge
and apply for an MA program. I’m thrilled to report that I’ve just been
accepted to Johns
Hopkins for the MA in Writing program, with a concentration in Fiction. I
start classes in just a few weeks and even though I’m certain my life is going
to get a lot busier with class assignments being juggled along with all my
other activities, I am very much looking forward to tackling the chaos.

My posting frequency has fallen off this year, especially in the last several months, but this doesn't mean I haven't been writing. In fact, I HAVE been writing, and, therefore, not getting to the blog except to post a photo now and then. I, of course, hope to do better in the future (and may need to make some new years resolutions about that!)

Welcome!

I am a writer. I use writing to simplify my life. I spend my days writing, but somehow I still need to write about it, so you'll see a lot here about my writing projects and publishing efforts.

I have a lot of interests beyond writing...photography, yoga, gardening, books I've read, travel. Oh, and did I mention science? You'll still see a lot of that, too. I love complex systems...fractals, emergence, chaos...but I also love space, astronomy, cosmology...in other words, all things awesome.

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